Walking around Toronto and Montréal these days, it is remarkable how few people are sporting poppies. To be fair, I grew up at an anglophone all-boy school and then joined a fraternity with strong military ties at McGill, so between November 1st and November 11th poppies were everywhere. The fraternity was in fact renamed the […]
For the second time, I attended the Personal Democracy Forum (PDF) in New York City in June 2013. The lineup of speakers was excellent, I got to see the great Ethan Zuckerman from the MIT Civic Lab, Sasha Issenberg, author of the Victory Lab, Robin Chase founder of ZipCar and many more. The conference was […]
“They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.” – Benjamin Franklin For the same reason you buy home insurance, you should stand against government surveillance. The recent revelations of the National Security Agency (NSA) PRISM project that collects electronic communications are shocking – though not […]
Canadian open data needs to get pumped up! In the past year, the UK government has announced a 10 million pound investment into the Open Data Institute and the Google Foundation gave over 1.6 million dollars to the UK group MySociety and over 2.1 million to the US Sunlight Foundation. In Canada, we have yet to see […]
Civic participation isn’t for everyone. In the non-profit and democratic fields, we too often attempt to convert the general public to our worldview that all citizens should be actively engaged in their communities, participate in votes, attend public assemblies and actively engage with their elected officials. This idealistic view of society drives many folks towards […]
Today’s politicians seem to be play to the centre; not the political centre, but the intellectual centre. Instead of grand, bold, crazy ideas such as putting a man to the moon, eradicating horrible diseases, or fundamentally reforming society through constitutional amendments, they propose moderate reforms that risk few upset stomachs. The lack of vision saddens […]
Bourdon, Sébastien (1616-1671) The Selling of Joseph into Slavery The Occupy mouvement that took hold in 2011 has transformed its efforts into something quite interesting. They recently launched the Rolling Jubilee, a program to use past and new donations to purchase and forgive distressed debt from individuals (see Guardian article). The aim is to […]
La crise étudiante de 2012 a déjà fait couler beaucoup d’encre, mais je propose néanmoins d’offrir quelques réflexions. Avec l’élection du Parti Québecois, il semble que la crise soit terminée – enfin, pour le moment. Lors des démonstrations du printemps dernier, j’ai eu de nombreuses discussions avec des personnes des deux côtés du débat. Les […]
My two favourite films are Baraka and now, Samsara. Both are silent movies that travel the globe in exquisite detail. Far too many movies use speech, sound effects and music as a form of filler for mediocre stories, images, and acting. These two films show you factory farms, sex workers, garbage pickers, wealth, poverty, and […]
National debt, taxes and government inefficiency are regular dinner table talk these days. The discussion usually boils down to: pro-government save the poor vs. anti-(big)-government do-it-yourself arguments. Both sides have valid points and deserve being listened to, but when push comes to shove, there is no denying that the services we take for granted cost […]